In Somervell County, Texas, the Paluxy River has cut down through the Glen Rose Formation to resistant beds and planed off wide exposures of rock in its bottom, laying bare footprints made about 113 million years ago, when dinosaurs pressed their feet into fine limy mud on the shore of an ancient sea. The park’s 1,525 acres hold five main track sites with well-preserved prints of both theropods and sauropods. In 1909, after a flood the year before, a child found large three-toed tracks along the river. When the American Museum of Natural History palaeontologist R. T. Bird came to the area, he found sauropod tracks as well, which were the first proof that sauropods walked on land. In 2026 plans for power infrastructure and data centres next to the park raised public concern about their effect on its wildlife, its watershed and the nearby tracksites.
Theropod and sauropod footprints along the Paluxy River · Early Cretaceous, about 113 mya
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
